Comment by jwstarr

A more quantitative approach can be found in a pair of papers from John C Nesbit, who analyzed ten algorithms in 1985/86 (https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-computer-based-in... ; https://archive.org/details/sim_journal-of-computer-based-in...). Generalized edit distance performed best, but also took the most time. The PLATO algorithm, which used a feature vector-esque approach, came in third in quality and was also efficient. Phonetic approaches came in third. Since the charts are hard to read and summarize, I converted the result into F1 scores (https://ztoz.blog/posts/nesbit/).